At a speech in Roanoke, Virginia, on July 13, the president makes a “no man is an island” type argument: “If you were successful, somebody along the line gave you some help. There was a great teacher somewhere in your life. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges. If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.”

Fox and Friends takes the sentence “If you’ve got a business—you didn’t build that” out of context. Republican operatives claim the president insulted small business owners. Rush Limbaugh says the president “hates this country.”

For Obama supporters, the story is exasperating because the word “that” in “you didn’t build that” so clearly refers to “roads and bridges,” not to businesses. In context, that’s obvious. And it’s exasperating because so many of the “builders” at the “we did build this” events seem like hypocrites—who benefit not only from taxpayer-financed roads, but from more direct government support, and still rail against a nonexistent insult to their self-sufficiency.

Finally it’s exasperating because—I humbly submit—the story reveals a deep-but-basic difference in how liberals and conservatives view the world.

Liberals are more likely to believe that one’s success in life depends not only on initiative but on family background and where you grew up (not just which country, but which neighborhood) and educational opportunities and luck. As Bill Gates, Sr. told Bill Moyers, “‘You earned it’ is really a matter of ‘you earned it with the indispensable help of your government.’ You earned it in this wonderful place. If you’d been born in West Africa, you would not have earned it. It would not have occurred. Your wealth is a function of being an American.” Hard work, liberals think, is often not enough. Lots of unsuccessful people work very hard; lots of successful people don’t.

Whereas conservatives (and I’m painting with a broad brush) are more likely to credit hard work, and to give primacy to individual agency.

In other words, liberals are more likely to believe that “if you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that”—where “that” actually means your business (and not roads and bridges, as the president would have it). “You” played a very large part, but, to quote the president, “somebody along the line gave you some help.” And that is why this campaign story won’t go away.